Movies: The Bechdel Test

Cafe Society
1

It goes like this:

The whole purpose is not to rate a movie’s quality or plot or watchability, but to rate how often and with what degree of depth women appear in mainstream films.

Here’s a longish article splaining it all.

Geena Davis, who has founded an institute to study women in mass media says,

I love movies about all types of subjects and Geena and her studies have been percolating in my head for some time now. But until I read about this Bechdel Test did it start to really work on me. Why are women so frequently relegated to supporting roles for men in action films? Why are they the prize or otherwise a person whose world revolves around a man/men in romantic movies?

A short reflection of the film collection in my home caused me to come up with just a few movies that I think pass. (I haven’t gone to the shelf and made an exhaustive study, however.)

Here is what they are:

Alien and Aliens — In the first one I think Ripley talks to other female crew members. In the second, which I just watched the other night, she definitely talks to Newt about the aliens.

Coal Miner’s Daughter — scenes between Loretta and Pasty Cline discussing pregnancy and maternity wear and aspects of singing country music.

The Wizard of Oz — Auntie Em and Miss Gulch discuss Dorothy and Toto biting her. Also, Glinda and Dorothy discuss whether or not she is a witch and where she is, before the Wizard who is going to solve her problem ever gets brought up.

Jerry McGuire — I seem to remember a lot of conversations between the main girl and her sister.

I am less sure about Beetlejuice, starring Davis of course. I think I recall Davis and Wynona Ryder talking about how great it is to be dead.

My last candidate is The Abyss, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it and while it has a strong lead female in Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio, I don’t remember if she has any significant conversations with other women. The sub driver is a woman as I recall but I think she was taking her orders from Ed Harris, not Mary Elizabeth.

Any other candidates? And what does this say about how we really view women?

2

Thank you for not saying/implying that a movie is feminist if it passes, and sexist if it fails, and that it was designed from the get-go so you could tell either way. That annoys me SO much.

3

The test is flawed. It implies something is ‘wrong’ with a film that doesn’t pass. The threshold of the female characters having to have a conversation with each other is the flawed part. If they do they do and if they don’t they don’t.

The first two Terminator films and Alien films have strong female leads, they don’t NEED to have a conversation with another female character to make the film ‘right’.

Now if a film has two named female characters and the only convo they have IS about men, I can understand the problem. But lf Newt was a boy, then Aliens isn’t a poorer film cause we didn’t see Ripley and Vasquez (?) talk about plasma rifles.

edit: I didn’t read the article. Sorry if I was wrong about what the test implies.
And don’t get me started on “Women in Fridges”

4

Has anyone ever.mistaken Vazquez for a man?

5

It isn’t implying that something’s “wrong” with a movie that doesn’t pass; rather, it’s like BMI. Not all that useful for evaluating specific movies, but rather for looking at a “population” of movies and revealing how few meaningful roles women really have in them.

I have begun to suspect that Marvel has been flunking them on purpose to make a point.

6

No. You?

7

Right. There are plenty of fine and enjoyable movies that don’t pass the Bechdel test. It’s only when you start realizing how many don’t pass that you notice, “hey, this says something interesting about movies in general”.

8

I’m somewhat surprised that, with as well known as the Bechdel test is becoming, more directors don’t throw in a scene just for the sake of passing the test. Which would be completely missing the point, I know, but still…

Then again, maybe it’s only “well known” in the particular corners of the Internet that I frequent.

9

No, it’s certainly not the end-all, be-all, but its value to me is that (a) it’s a startling low bar to clear, and (b) it’s shocking how few films clear it. As a guy who was blind to this sort of thing, it really opened my eyes to how male-centric the film industry is.

10

It’s been a while since I saw Alien, but the only conversation I remember between Ripley and Lambert was when they were talking about which of the guys on the crew they’d had sex with (all but Ash, it turns out)…

Any movie with a mostly female cast is going to pass the test, but the fact there are so few kind of speaks to the point anyway… Bridesmaids, Joy Luck Club, Devil Wears Prada…

11

I’m no screenwriter, but I imagine it might be quite difficult just to “throw in” a Bechdel-qualifying scene in a movie that would otherwise fail the test. All of a sudden you’ve got two female characters who have to be given sufficient depth and dimension to hold the audience’s interest in a scene where they’re not talking either to or about any of the male characters? That could come across as quite jarring.

12

You know, my brain just exploded trying to decide whether or not this is a whoosh.

13

Nope, meant perfectly seriously. I think a LOT of movies would seem a bit weird if two female characters in them suddenly briefly developed fully formed personalities, as opposed to being mostly plot devices/eye candy/reflectors of the male characters’ personalities.

Like I said, I don’t think the absence of at least two fully developed female characters necessarily makes a movie bad, but it does mean that it might not be so easy just to “throw in” a Bechdel-qualifying scene without coming across a bit odd.

14

Yes, the point of the Bechdel test is not to say whether a movie is good or bad (or ‘feminist’ or ‘masculinist’ or whatever). It’s more to point out something we rarely notice.

It’s a “fish never notice the water” sort of thing. There are many aspects of our culture that we’re never really fully aware of, simply because they seem to us to be The Way Things Are.

For example, people in English-speaking markets of the 1930s and 1940s were very accustomed to seeing black people depicted in films as servants (and not-very-bright servants, at that). It was “normal.” People of that time would have been shocked at the suggestion that there was anything odd or worthy of comment about movie depictions of black men and women.

15

FWIW, Alison Bechdel, who draws the cartoonDykes to Watch Out For, was not really engaging in serious film criticism when she drew the cartoon that spawned the Bechdel test, which was some time in the late 1980s. She just drew two women having trouble finding a movie to go see, and one of them said she doesn’t see movies unless there are at least two women who talk to each other about something besides the men-- something she couldn’t possible know without seeing the movie. There’s nothing in the lines about named characters, or men in general, it’s “the men.” The the woman says the last film she was able to see was Alien, because the two women in it talked to each other about the monster. The strip probably came out seven or eight years after Alien.

It’s certainly a valid critique of films, that there are more good roles for men than for women, and the women’s roles are often subordinate, but again, Bechdel was just a cartoonist tossing off a joke that tok on a life of it’s own.

She also tossed off “Does ‘anal-retentive*’ have a hyphen?” in another cartoon, and someone asked her permission to print it on a T-shirt, and it became a popular catch-phrase for a while, with a lot of people who probably had no idea there was a lesbian comic strip to begin with.
*According to Merriam-Webster, yes, but they may just like hyphens.

16

If it happens suddenly like that, then it sounds like a scene headed to the cutting room floor, seeing as it has nothing to do with advancing the plot…

17

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

18

We’ve had numerous threads on this already:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=718390&highlight=Bechdel

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=686975&highlight=Bechdel

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=642100&highlight=Bechdel

I’ll say what I did before, which is that people tend to respond to this by finding a few movies that pass it (or else by finding loopholes in it, or suggesting the test isn’t valid)
I think it’s a pretty telling test. It doesn’t set a particularly high bar to pass, but most of my favorite movies and many movies I admire don’t pass it. That says a lot about the relative positions of the sexes in popular entertainment
Among films I’ve seen recently, it occurs to me that Disney’s Frozen passes with flying colors. I wonder if they had the Bechdel test in mind when they made it.
I suspect Enchanted passes it, too.

19

So does Tangled – the conversations between Rapunzel and her mother.

It’s also hard to define what it means to be talking about men. They ran the test on the Doctor Who episodes, but were smart enough not to exclude conversations where the Doctor is mentioned in passing (e.g., “I’m traveling with the Doctor. Tell me about how your society works.”).

There are many movies that pass, but it does take some thought to come up with them. Too many films don’t even try to have women characters who are anything but love interests for the lead.

20

I haven’t seen these in a while but from what I remember:

Fried Green Tomatoes: The ladies talking about the old ladies’ past.

Clueless: The girls talk a lot about non-men stuff.

Alice in Wonderland: Alice and the Red Queen talk about whether to off her head.

Kill Bill: The Bride and other female assassins talking assassin stuff.

Steel Magnolias: The ladies talked about non-men stuff.

Who?